I spent 30 days with Plasma 5.21 - Return of the King?

[Music] i've had an on-again off-again relationship with kde plasma since about 2009. back then kde4 was almost a vision of what windows vista and what windows 7 could have been it was smooth it was blurry it was translucent it was elegant it was new it it had a lot going for it it was so freaking customizable and powerful that it took the kde 3 functionality to a whole new level of aesthetic wonder but the visual panache came at a cost and it gained a reputation of being somewhat bloated and crafty as ironically enough windows vista and windows 7 soon went on to have as well now when kde plasma 5 rolled around in 2015 i gave it a largely very positive review as they'd managed to iron out a lot of the bugs and kinks and resource craftiness of kde iv they'd flattened out the shapes all of the colors were bolder there was sharper angles it was uh it was very functional but they had managed to strip it into a lean mean fighting machine now ever since 2015 caddy plasma has been on the up and up and in the last 12 months especially there's been a groundswell of support for this desktop environment being the best that money can't buy so today after running plasma 5.21 on kde neon for the last 30 days i'm taking a deep dive into everything that i love about everything that i've learned from and everything that i wish for the kde plasma desktop but before we deep dive right in a quick word from those who have made today's video possible nordvpn if you're watching this video you probably love the internet you love linux and you understand the importance of privacy that's why nordvpn is one of the best choices that you can make to secure your internet traffic access geo-restricted content and enjoy the freedom of the global internet without the hassle of slow servers or poor platform support or expensive plans one of the things that i'm particularly excited about with nordvpn is nord lynx their relatively new vpn protocol built with our open source darling wire guard and 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to a specific section of this deep dive but it could be a long one forewarned is forearmed i don't know how that saying goes okay let's get on with things so first thing i want to talk about is in plasma 5.21 which came out about a month ago from the time of the recording of this video uh i'm gonna go through some of the things that were new to this release and my thoughts on them how they've changed my my perception of plasma and the workflow and that kind of thing first things first the application launcher um this application launcher is a much more logical i don't know it fits the way my brain works compared to kickoff and the simple menus before that now it's not everyone's taste and that's fine but i think for most people for what we're used to and what we expect from desktop environments i think it's great it ergonomically makes sense on multiple monitor sizes whether you're on a tiny laptop screen you can kind of shrink it down but if you're on a big desktop display it also looks completely in place uh the other thing is is that it's a much more uh touchable menu if that makes sense and for a lot of the two in ones out there that do actually have pretty decent touch screen support under linux uh it's great to see that this menu makes better sense for those kinds of people also the quick session controls down here are amazing the older launchers are still available and you can use the show alternatives button to switch between them and then you can also add older menus back from the kde plasma ad stuff panel which we'll get into that more later also the other thing that i really like about it is that i love the fact that you get these really specific uh descriptions of each of the apps so they're alphabetized but then on the side you get a really clear description about what each of these apps is great discoverability tweak there and i think it it gives the apps and it makes the apps make a lot more sense especially to new users which i think is very important okay let's talk about application uh theming now uh this is something where the breeze theme the the theme that uh the theme that is native to the plasma desktop has been evolving for a few years now um what i like about the what they've done with plasma 5.21 is they've tidied up the window controls and where the the header bar which is this top menu bit here that you or the top of the window that you grab and also the bit underneath the window now they've also tidied this up with some gtk apps as well so that the theming looks more consistent no matter what widget set the app is built on the window controls and overall theming looks decent under whether you're using flat pack snap app images or native uh apps from the repositories which is really nice i think there's been a lot of effort gone into visual consistency between the qt5 framework which is basically what the kde plasma desktop is built on a lot of the apps are built on the widget set that they are built on and also that making that theming work with gtk apps at least for the default plasma breeze style so once you come into the global or sorry the theming section in plasma settings you can come in here and you can change obviously the plasma and then the application theme that you're running and you've always been able to do this with plasma plasma is amazingly configurable but something about the way that they've kind of been able to flatten out some of the flatten out some of the gradients and give really clear visibility to the main controls that you need things like back and all the window control buttons makes things really clearly visible and also it leaves great room for using your own color scheme to kind of highlight your own personal take on the breeze theme and now also this does bring to mind the uh the download new stuff dialog boxes which kde plasma has had for such a long time but they've uh sort of changed the layout of it a bit to make it a little bit more discoverable and a little bit more app store-ish and and you can sort through these based on how well these color schemes are rated among other things so being able to add your own color scheme to plasma has always existed but it's great that the breeze theme i feel is at a point where you can really take advantage of that well without the desktop looking out of place also that begs to say that no matter what wallpaper you're running you could probably still get a great result with the breeze theme running now of course there are plenty of great plasma themes out there and i'm not going to get into that in this session but the the overall look and feel of breeze is looking fantastic even these context menus look amazing this is a small detail but look at how great the alignment is of the icons the fonts and then the arrow keys off to the side and keyboard shortcuts it is so neat also in plasma 5.21 they enabled the breeze twilight theme which i think ubuntu was doing this for a few years uh basically you get a dark uh plasma widgets set so you get a dark panel and if you add any widgets to the desktop they are also dark but in the application theme itself is still light now if we go to the global theme section that we were looking at before you'll see there's breeze breeze dark and breeze twilight you can kind of get a bit of a pick up there on what those look like the other thing that i do want to mention is notification pop-ups because this was a bug bear of mine with kde plasma for quite some time first of all the notification shade and the notification center was a bit disorganized i'll get to that a little bit later but also the position of notification pop-ups on the desktop and the way that those looked and that you could interact with them always felt too clunky for me and now they do look a lot smoother so as you can see i have moved the default notifications from the bottom right to the top right because that's just where i'm used to seeing them i suppose and the fact that you can come in here and configure granularly which applications you want to allow to bother you and you can obviously enable do not disturb and you can even set that to automatically go to do not disturb when your screen is mirrored so if you're presenting off your laptop for example it will automatically not bother you with notifications just so nothing embarrassing happens i think that's a good tweak i want to move on to the system settings and talk about that in general but before i do make sure that if you are enjoying this content then you definitely go click that subscribe button we're chasing down 70 000 subscribers at the moment we're getting pretty close so every sub counts thank you for your support so system settings system settings is an app that kde plasma has always excelled at and they've gradually over the years been refining tidying up and consolidating a lot of these app categories or sorry a lot of these settings categories so that they make sense in plasma 5.21 they've added a configuring firewall section which can enable or configure a firewall based on a number of different backends which i think is great to see the more consolidation that you can have with your system all under one system settings panel is amazing the other thing i want to point out here is searchability the fact that you can use either krunner which incidentally k runner on the plasma desktop is one of the greatest keyboard shortcuts that ever lived the fact that i can come in here and just search dpi and it can hotlink me straight through to the configuring the fonts in system settings is amazing and this level of discoverability makes sorting through these system settings so much better i dare say this is probably one of the most comprehensive system settings panels or system settings apps in in computers right now because windows is still split across the new system settings and control panel mac os seems to be taking more and more settings away from the user the fact that we have this many settings and this discoverable in a coherent desktop environment i think is nothing short of amazing it would be great to see especially with weyland as the weyland support for trackpad gestures with lib input is very very good it'd be great to see some of those settings make their way into plasma system settings now this is not a new feature for plasma 5.21 but it's been around since the last time i was living in plasma and that was the button here that highlights change settings so anytime you come into kde system settings and you change something and you want to change it back and you don't remember where it was you can just say highlight change settings and it will let you know what was the last thing that you tweaked excellent stuff now rumor mill is turning that apparently we will get to the point one day very soon where you will be able to export your plasma system settings uh configurations and be able to import them onto a new system so everything that you've customized through system settings will eventually be able to be transported from one system to another and i think that is dope so that's just a rumor mill at this point but it would be great to see if that is if that becomes a thing okay let's talk about applets applets are my term i guess or the industry's term for little bits of code or little little applications that can do certain things on the desktop so when i'm talking about applets here on kde plasma plasma has always been known for its amazing library of widgets and being able to add cool stuff to panels and desktops alike to give you glanceable information or quick controls over the things that matter to you now this time around i want to highlight a few key things first of all when it comes to browser integration with youtube for example and you start playing an a video the level of desktop integration that we get now without is really great for example with that window minimized the playback keys on my keyboard will continue to work and enable that video to keep playing but also i have a little playback button living in the toolbar here and it even goes a bit further than that when it comes to the lock screen i can actually control playback of the video from the lock screen as well and depending on what kind of video i have playing i can also sometimes get a thumbnail of what's playing as well and then this maps to the handy dandy little media applet media player that you can drag onto the desktop and as you can see now i have a little thumbnail playback widget here living on my desktop that while i have a video playing on firefox i can control the playback millions of people around the world it's great if you're listening to youtube podcasts or some other genre of youtube video that doesn't really require you to be visually engaged with what's going on but you still want to have control over the playback of that video the sound app is also amazing for people that work with a lot of inputs and outputs and need to be able to jump between them and change volume really quickly this is something that i do a lot and i wish wish wish that every operating system on the planet had this kind of control built into their sound applet you can change the volume level of particular applications or devices tell me you can get that anywhere else also this is an interesting little thing that i found if you do three finger click on the desktop you get a clipboard with a paste of the last thing that you highlighted so in this case i highlighted the the opening recording of what you just heard in the opening of this video and that is the last thing that i had on my clipboard and so it will create a little sticky note on your desktop with the last thing that you had that you had highlighted or copied onto your clipboard so not only do you have a clipboard manager that has everything that you have put into your clipboard but if you middle click or if you three finger click with the trackpad on the desktop it'll create a sticky note with that copied content very productive final thing i want to say about applets is i think the layout of this tray is so much better than what it was even a year ago from what i remember the fact that we have these much nicer easier and more spaced out tiles for the different things that can live on our notification tray is really nice one criticism that i do have though is that the notification area for apps that are not like kde plasma aware for example obs and mail spring and synergy synology drive here are much closer together and they're stacked much closer together than the rest of the cat plasma widgets on the panel it's uh it's a very small visual thing but those those things do add up now the other cool thing that i just want to mention is that the ability to be able to pin any one of these applets to the desktop and have it stay up here running is fantastic say if i have a big file that's transferring or a download that's running or something like that i can simply just bring up that panel pin it there to the desktop and that way it won't go away when i start navigating through elsewhere in the desktop and it will stay on top again amazing little productivity hack that very few other desktops give you once again a really quick plug for kde connect if you have never used kde connect it is a fantastic piece of software that can help sync your android device to your desktop to be able to allow you to playback media send sms's all that fun stuff it's very very awesome here's some of my sort of general thoughts about plasma the power and the resource efficiency that this desktop gives you without you having to install extra software or bits and pieces or extensions to be able to get the kind of power and efficiency that you need is amazing and they have a rich rich ecosystem of themes and add-ons and extensions and widgets and all of this other stuff that has been built by the kde plasma community it just has customization in spades over some of the other desktop environments not only in the open source world but in mac and windows as well whalen's support continues to improve with plasma 5.21 and it'll be great to see and for me personally i haven't jumped on the wayland boat yet but it's becoming uh it's becoming very tempting to be able to jump onto uh the the next generation of display managers because uh yeah x is probably getting a little bit long in the tooth at this point now this is something that um i'm going to speak briefly into the performance of what i've noticed now your performance may vary obviously depending on your hardware and and what os you're running plasma on top of but for me with kde neon 5.21 i have found categorically that the system hiccups less especially window animations the desktops overall fluidity is is less impacted by cpu intensive tasks than what i've found on gtk based desktops gnome and budgie and elementary and the like and i don't know where to put this down to whether it is a more efficient window manager or whether there's just less bottlenecking going on i'm not really sure but the performance of kde plasma 5.21 has been better in a number of different metrics for me personally and overall system responsiveness has been better than what i've had over the last few years running predominantly gnome okay let's move on to application management because this is something that uh that kind of blew me away that this is working as well as it is because the last time i used kde discover which is the default software management uh service it was a bit of a buggy mess and by golly it's neatened out and not only that but it manages the updates and multiple software back-ends seamlessly so first of all you go into settings and you can uh enable and disable certain software sources now by default on kde neon flat hub and snap i think flat hub is enabled by default and you can add snap just by checking the box no other software manager that i am aware of that is attached to a desktop environment is capable of doing this i don't know why but this is amazing the fact that i can get firmware updates updates for the operating system and updates for apps both from snap and from flat hub all without leaving the software management app is nothing short of amazing so when i'm sorting through applications you do have little indicator icons as to where that app is coming from you have the little icon for flat hub you have the one from snap you get a little magnet i think from snap and uh by default it does seem to want to promote the flat hub apps out of the box you can change which software source you want it to show you first but you can still install apps from those other sources if you so choose this level of both presentation but also functionality built into the one app is amazing also the updates seem to work really really well reminds me a lot of the elementary app center and it is working really well like way quicker than i've experienced in the past so i've been really impressed and i've been running this now for a month and it hasn't given me any trouble whatsoever just seems to be happy churning away doing its thing and i can still go back and and look at other applications and it all seems really stable okay rapid fire i'm going to stare at my notes so i can get through these in a timely manner okay first of all ocular is what is one amazing pdf reader and annotation software i use a lot of pdf stuff in my in my job i'm a high school teacher and being able to annotate pdfs is key and being able to have a tool like this built into the kde desktop is amazing that goes for pretty much all the apps out there except for a great video app i don't know why kde plasma and neon especially defaults to having vlc apart from the fact that vlc is a tried and true media player i wish plasma had its own native media player that came by default i ended up choosing haruna video player but it'd be great to see one installed by default the other thing that i've noticed is that the kde neon with plasma 5.21 gives me much better battery life out of the box what i mean by that is on ubuntu 20.04 and later i usually have to use some pretty aggressive power management techniques uh that you can go and check i'll put a link to the video that i made about that um in order to get some decent battery life on my dell xps 9570 but in plasma out of the box without me tweaking anything i can get about the same battery life without tweaking anything and i think that's amazing so the other thing is is that multi-monitor setups seem a lot more flexible to me and the fact that you can preserve display configurations for different monitor setups is also really helpful when you plug in a new monitor and you decide if you want to be the primary display or if you want a mirror or whatever it is it'll ask do you want to preserve this for every time you plug this monitor in so you can say yes or no and the configuration that you get with that is really really nice here are some tweaks that i personally have made apart from enabling fusuma for these multi-finger gestures i also had to enable the natural scrolling on the trackpad because it is not natural scrolling and also you don't have tap to click so those two things were one of the first things that i did i also disabled the double click for the uh for the file management this is where if you've selecting anything on the desktop if you do one click by default that'll just open the file or the folder so i didn't really like that so i ended up going and just searching double and it came up with the general behavior and i could simply click on what i wanted a single click to do and in this case i just wanted to select i've got three horizontal workspaces here as you can see in the little horizontal workspace indicator down here below that is there by default by the way and i also did tweak the fonts in the system from i believe it was the noto sans font uh that's just the regular noto sans to i changed it to the uh noto sans cj khk which i think is just a regional variant uh that's suited for other languages but i just find it it looks smoother and nicer and i just prefer it so that's really all i've done to this desktop the rest is kind of vanilla how it comes out of the box and before we get out of here i want to talk about my wish list for what i would hope to see out of plasma in the future first of all is a spacebar preview i've talked about this in many videos but spacebar preview is one of my key productivity hacks that i love on mac os i can do it on windows i can do it on a gnome relatively easily but it'd be great to see this in plasma it being able to just hit the spacebar not only opens the app quickly and previews whatever file you want to do but it also closes the app quickly and when you're a video editor and you're constantly jumping between different files looking for the right one being able to preview thumbnails video audio very quickly is killer also it'd be great to see with the fact that plasma has an amazing global menu widget and amazing support for a bunch of different apps to use a global menu it'd be great to see a heads-up display menu used in or available as a widget in the plasma desktop now i realize there are projects out there that that do this but they're all basically tied to github pages that are semi-abandoned at this point so to be great if that became an official thing i already mentioned it'd be great to have gestures natively supported in kde plasma so that i don't have to set up for zuma behind the scenes and like i said be great to see a well integrated media player to relieve the venerable vlc of its position here in kde neon as the default media player i realize vlc is about to get an overhaul anyway but that's beside the point i do want to give a shout out to the wonderful work that nate graham has been doing engaging with the community and communicating to everyone all the of the amazing work that's going into the plasma desktop at the moment he seems to be able to provide a write-up summary of what's going on in the plasma world really really often and it gives this sense of amazing momentum and it gives a visible buzz around the linux community every time kde plasma is working on something the other thing is that desktop linux distributions seem to be doing a great job of adopting plasma really quickly with very few deal-breaking bugs and this is key because it allows the user base to enjoy the latest plasma goodies that the kde team have to offer whether you're an arch ubuntu fedora opensuse type person you seem to be able to enjoy all those benefits nonetheless so for me at the end of this video and at the end of these 30 days i yeah i'm sticking with plasma for right now and i'm starting to wonder to myself why why is gnome the default desktop on so many of the major linux based operating systems out there despite the fact that linux users as a general rule they are more on the side of power users than they do on being fans of minimalist application centric design plasma 5.21 is hands down the most feature complete resource efficient evolutionary but powerful somehow instantly recognizable desktop environment that there is and getting used to this productive efficiency and customizable shell is going to be really hard to switch away from hey blaine here thanks for checking out the infinitely galactic project look if you want to find more videos like this then definitely go check out the channel subscribe if you're new turn on notifications all that good stuff and you can chat with me on twitter at ingalactic see you in the next one

Channel: InfinitelyGalactic

Views: 82,550

Keywords: infinitelygalactic, technology, linux, open-source, free software, ubuntu, alternatives to windows, alternatives to macos, distro reviews, app reviews, plasma 5.21 review, kde plasma, desktop, plasma 2021 review

Id: da-rOlS_o58

Length: 27min 26sec (1646 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 24 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/mrbmi513]

GSconnect for well integrated KDE Connect functionality. Still uses the KDE Connect mobile app.

[u/[deleted]]

dash to panel if you want a panel.

but better use kde if you want to have that workflow.

[u/Greninja9559]

Pop shell for tiling functionality.